Wednesday, May 19, 2010

I've had a handful of clients who asked me similar questions. They are always curious how these viruses get onto their systems. One of the tacticts used to get viruses on your computer is called "Malvertising". It's a technique where a advertiser pops up an ad that looks like it's a security warning about your computer. When you click on that "warning", the virus or scareware is installed.

This technique is becomming more common, with a recent study concluding that 1.3 million ads are viewed per day. 1.3 MILLION!!

Here's some more information below from the ZDNet article that I read.

New research released by Dasient indicates that based on their sample, 1.3 million malicious ads are viewed per day, with 59 percent of them representing drive-by downloads, followed by 41 percent of fake security software also known as scareware

The attack vector, known as malvertising, has been increasingly trending as a tactic of choice for numerous malicious attackers, due to the wide reach of the campaign once they manage to trick a legitimate publisher into accepting it.

More findings from their research:

•The probability of a user getting infected from a malvertisement is twice as likely on a weekend and the average lifetime of a malvertisement is 7.3 days

•97% of Fortune 500 web sites are at a high risk of getting infected with malware due to external partners (such as javascript widget providers, ad networks, and/or packaged software providers)

•Fortune 500 web sites have such a high risk because 69% of them use external Javascript to render portions of their sites and 64% of them are running outdated web applications

The research’s findings are also backed up by another recently released report by Google’s Security Team, stating that fake AV is accounting for 50 percent of all malware delivered via ads.

Monday, May 17, 2010

As web developers, the one thing that drives us nuts is the amount of users still using old web browsers. They fail to provide security and a rich experience online, and they're just plain out-dated. You just dont know what your missing when you're browsing the web. When I can across the IE6 funeral page, I couldnt help but post it up here.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Since Steve Job's announced to the world that Apple would never support Adobe Flash on it's mobile devices, the design world has become energized by the concepts of HTML5 and CSS3. I've seen more articles on the subject in the last 2 weeks than I've seen in the last 6 months. This momentum is slightly premature, because the majority of older browsers simply don't work with HTML 5.

Where this new standard in web design comes in handy though is when you are developing for mobile users. For the most part, modern smart phone browsers will support HTML5, which means that you can encode video on your websites that your mobile visitors should be able to watch without the use of Flash. This has been on of the biggest complaints amongst mobile users (and iPad users).

There are some extra bits of code that need to be included on the site in order to make this work, but this is just the beginning. When all the grandparents of the Internet switch from their outdated Internet browsers to something a little more up to date, I hope to see a real change in the way we view our browsing experience. It's going to be really amazing!

Hughes I.T. Solutions will be there on the forefront of HTML5 and CSS3, designing sites that are modern and standards compliant. We look forward to making your design ideas a reality. Give us a call anytime to discuss your needs and how we might be able to help!